The true value of partners

Without partners, many of a designer’s ideas would remain just that – unfulfilled ideas.

Over the past 6 months, Projektor has been working with Switchback Cyclery to help bring their brand to life. Located in the Riverside neighbourhood, just east of downtown Toronto, Switchback is a bike store a founded on a strong social purpose – providing “street” people a hand up by offering them meaningful employment through the store and getting Torontonians out of their cars and onto a bike.

It was apparent though, that this venture would only succeed if people heard and more importantly, talked about it. As a start up with limited funds for marketing, Switchback needed to find ways of getting their name out in an efficient yet visually engaging and dynamic way. So we made a decision to produce a limited run of high quality cycling fashions – not really for sale but in order to create living, mobile billboards for the brand.

Once we came up with idea to create custom caps and merino wool jerseys, the team spent considerable time finding partners who could not only bring our ideas to life but ones who also shared our passion about the idea of propelling communities through cycling. We needed to find people who would be as excited as we were about bringing the ideas to life and not just be focused on filling an order. We knew we needed more than suppliers; we needed true partners who would build off our ideas and make them even better. We were fortunate to find two such partners in Walz Caps and Cima Coppi.

Walz Caps, based in California make all their caps by hand, ensuring that we could get exactly the image we were looking for. From prototyping to making suggestions on how to make the cap design work better, we were so happy to get the final caps and were truly amazed at the quality given the low price point.

With Vancouver based Cima Coppi we found a partner who also believed that cycling is sustainable and healthy pursuit that brings communities together. The folks at Cima Coppi are artisans in the true sense of the word – designing and making their product out of renewable fabrics here in Canada.

And for us – the best part of working with true partners is that when the box arrives with the final product, we feel just like kids at Christmas – in a state of ecstasy from both awe and excitement of the moment.

Thanks to all our partners for collaborating with us and helping to bring our ideas to life.